The Diary of John Cam Hobhouse: Editorial

Accidentals

Hobhouse’s diary is not, in its manuscript form, a document prepared to be published and read, and I have not treated its accidentals, or even, sometimes, its syntax, with the respect that I would give to a piece of prose by Byron.  I’m sure Hobhouse would have been horrified at the idea of his diary appearing in the public domain at all: how much more horrified would he have been had I chosen to print an entry like this, which reproduces, emboldened, exactly what he wrote, and then adds material, unemboldened and in square brackets, to clarify it:

While editing, I have often found that it is only after I have intervened on some scale that I can understand what Hobhouse has written:

As can be seen, I have not aimed at formal prose, as Lady Dorchester did in Recollections of a Long Life.  That would be very hard, for the diary is never quite in formal prose, though it retains a Latinate syntax which makes grammatical editing easy.  Still, Hobhouse’s dashes and ampersands, like Byron’s, indicate the speed at which he wrote, and give the work an apt, diary-ish feel, to lose which would be foolish.

I have used the following guidelines:

1. I have introduced paragraphing.  Hobhouse rarely has any.
2. To keep the prose informal, I have preserved Hobhouse’s dashes in surprising lists, and to signal the unexpected.  Elsewhere I have substituted commas, semi-colons, full stops, and even colons, as the syntax, grammatical or dramatic, has seemed to me to demand.
3. At the ends of sentences and entries, Hobhouse often uses long dashes, short dashes, rows of full stops, double full stops, and so on, in a way which often seems decorative.  I have confined myself, mainly, to triple-dot ellipses (…).
4. Hobhouse divides many words in two which modern usage has joined.  With regret, I have unified such phrases as “to day”, “every one”, “any thing”, “some one”, and “every thing”.
5. Sometimes I have changed Hobhouse’s word-order, to clarify phrases.
6. Hobhouse mis-spells many of the foreign words he uses.  I have, with regret, corrected and regularised, and have indicated important departures in the notes.  I have italicised all foreign words other than place-names.  Hobhouse often underlines place-names, or even puts them in inverted commas, as though he knows secretly that they aren’t real.  I have kept them un-emphasised, in Roman.  The principle on which Hobhouse employs inverted commas is not clear: in the case of Greek names, it may indicate his uncertainty as to how to spell the name in the Latin alphabet.
7. Hobhouse often elides past participles poetically: “tow’d”, “stow’d”, and so on, but is irregular in the habit.  I have only done this in verse quotations.  He also prefers “thro’” to “through”; I have used “through”, except in verse quotations.
8. Hobhouse often underlines in a haphazard way, just because a place-name intrigues him.  I have used italics for book-titles, theatrical titles, names of ships, verse quotations, foreign phrases, and dramatic emphases.
9. Hobhouse superscripts the “t”s, “r”s, and “rs”s in “S^t”, “M^r”, “M^rs”, and “D^r”.  I have not done so.
10. With some regret, I have modernised and corrected Hobhouse’s spelling, losing such usages as “gulph”, “straight” (for “strait”), “cloathes”, “staid” (for “stayed”), “agreable”, “croud”, and the US-preferred “honor” (in which Hobhouse is in any case inconsistent).
11. I have used [sic] as infrequently as possible.
12. I have omitted the apostrophe which Hobhouse often places in “her’s”.
13. I have corrected obvious misspellings silently.
14. No matter what Hobhouse writes, I have written nearly all figures below a hundred in words.
15. I have expanded Hobhouse’s “SSW”, and so on, to “south-south-west”, and so on.
16. I have expanded Hobhouse’s “½ p 6”, and so on, to “half-past six”, and so on.
17. I have preserved Hobhouse’s infrequent use of “Y^e”, or “y^e”, though I have not superscripted its “e”.
18. Hobhouse places the pound-sign at the end of the figure, thus: “200£”.  I have placed it before.
19. [Words or letters in square brackets] are editorial additions.
20. <Words in angle brackets> are interesting deletions by Hobhouse.  I have by no means preserved all his deletions.
21. Two-space gaps [  ] in square brackets indicates one, or part of one, illegible word.
22. Hobhouse’s small sketches are rarely either informative or of aesthetic interest, and I have indicated their presence by [sketch].

If anyone objects to what I’ve done to Hobhouse's original, I have his raw text on disk too, should they prefer it, or wish to inspect it.

Abbreviations

Arbuthnot

The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, ed. Francis Bamford and the Duke of Wellington, 2 vols, Macmillan, 1950.

BB

Byron’s Bulldog; The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron, ed. Peter W.Graham (Columbus Ohio, 1984).

Blessington

Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr., Princeton, 1969.

BLJ

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (John Murray 1973-1994).

Borst

William A. Borst, Lord Byron’s First Pilgrimage, Archon Books, 1948.

Burnett

T.A.J. Burnett, The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy, John Murray, 1981.

CMP

Lord Byron The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford 1991).

CPW

Lord Byron The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, Oxford, 1980-92.

Dardanelles

Robert Adair, The Negotiations for the Peace of the Dardanelles in 1808-1809, Longman, 1845.

DLB

Department Lovelace, Bodleian.  All material from this source is reproduced with the permission of the Earl of Lytton and Lawrence Pollinger Ltd.

HVSV

His Very Self and Voice, ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr, Macmillan, 1954.

Italy

Italy: Remarks made in several visits from the year 1816 to 1854.  By the Right Hon. Lord Broughton G.C.B., London, 8vo, 2 vols, 1859.

JMA

John Murray Archive.  All material from this source is reproduced by kind permission.

Journey

A Journey through Albania, and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the years 1809 and 1810.  By J.C. Hobhouse, London, James Cawthorne, 4to, 2 vols, 1813.

Joyce

Michael Joyce, My Friend H., John Murray, 1948.

KSHR

Keats-Shelley House, Rome.  All material from this source is reproduced with kind permission.

LBAR

Doris Langley Moore, Lord Byron Accounts Rendered, John Murray, 1974.

LBW

Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife, Macdonald, 1962.

Letters

The Substance of some Letters written by an Englishman resident in Paris during the last Reign of the Emperor Napoleon.  With an Appendix of Official Documents, anon., London, 1816, 8vo, 2 vols (reprinted twice 1817, the third edition dedicated to Byron).  Translated as Lettres écrites de Paris, pendant le dernier règne de l’Empereur Napoléon, adressées principalement à l’honorable Lord Byron, Gand de Bruxelles, 1817, 2 vols 8vo.

LJ

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 6 volumes, John Murray, London 1898-1901.

LLB

Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron, John Murray 1961, rev. edn. 1976.

Marchand

Leslie A. Marchand, Byron A Biography, New York, Knopf, 3 vols, 1957.

Medwin

Ernest J. Lovell Jr. (ed.), Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, Princeton 1966.

Recollections

Recollections of a Long Life.  Ed. Lady Dorchester, John Murray 1909-11, 6 vols.  Selected and translated by Armand Fournier as Napoléon, Byron et leurs contemporains.  Souvenir d’une longue vie, (I: 1809-16.  II: 1816-22), Paris 1910.

Revival

Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, The Eve of the Greek Revival, Routledge, 1990.

Shelley

The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley, ed. R.Edgecumbe, John Murray 1912.

Stocking

Marion Kingston Stocking (ed.), The Clare Clairmont Correspondence, Johns Hopkins, 2 vols, 1995.

Travels

Travels in Albania and other Provinces of Turkey in 1809 and 1810, by the Right Honourable Lord Broughton G.C.B., John Murray London, 8vo, 2 vols, 1855.